Frank, we had to accept what destiny threw at us from 1971 – 87 and you didn’t live a single minute of it. WE DID. So go back and adore your alla tat-tafal li hadd ma jahmlu. Le, Mintoff la qatt kien statista, la politiku u l-anqas ragel. Kien dittatur a la Cinese. Bhal Mao, bhal Mugabe, bhal Idi Amin Dada, bhal Ceaucescu…. inkomplu?

Hi Frank,

You’re up early! You’re quite right, I don’t think you or I can say much more the the Mintoff subject to sway the other.

But I will leave you with a recommendation for some further reading, being John Manduca’s “A flavour of the Mintoff Era”. It is a collection of British foreign office papers dealing with the negotiations for the base agreement and secret annual reports by the high commissioners of the time to the foreign office.

Amongst the myriad negative comments about his authoritharianism from various commissioners, one high comissioner comments that he doubts whether Mintoff will bother to hold an election.

That says a lot and puts him in the company of leaders no democratic leader would wish to be. But we forget who Mintoff’s friends were/are. Gaddafi, Ceacescu, Kim il Sung, Mugabe…

Thank you for a highly interesting discussion Mike, I enjoyed it.

Continuing with it seems pointless however because we are now only going round in circles.

Very best wishes to you and your family
.

Frank,

He is refreshing to YOU, because he shares your point of view. To the rest of us, his rewrite of historic fact is as offensive as yours, factually incorrect, and has been amply debunked in this article, that one, and many others.

Mike,

Without covering old ground again and continue going round in circles, perhaps the best thing that I can do is point out the following comments taken from the link that you attached.

It’s quite interesting including the many comments but I must say that most of them lacked any semblance of objectivity which has been my main bone of contention with this blog all along.

There is however a contributor who goes by the name of Uncle Fester whose comments I found to be surprisingly refreshing. While he is certainly no fan of Dom Mintoff, he does seem to have the ability to analyse the matter in a very sensible way.

@Daphne. There you go again unaware that you are totally blinkered and unable to see Dom Mintoff objectively. You need to try and see him from the perspective of the people he represented – the poor, the working class, the marginalized and disenfranchised.

If you are able to do that you will come to a more objective understanding of him. Understanding him does not necessarily mean admiring him or even liking him. It means just that – understanding where he’s coming from.

Antoine and your interesting psychobabble is just part of the picture. Remember Mintoff could have stayed in England if he wanted to after he graduated from Oxford. He didn’t. Keep in mind that he wanted integration with the U.K. to allow the Maltese to enjoy the better economic conditions of the U.K.at the time.

The PN at one point advocated the Italianita of Malta which was an attempt at integration with Italy. At the time of integration, Mintoff was also trying to appeal to Constitutionalist Party voters who were die-hard pro-British – his meetings with the Union Jack behind him should be seen in this context as well.

@Daphne. I understand what you went through and my heart goes out to you and others who suffered under the worst of Mintoff’s excesses, I lived through those times as well – 20 punt and all the rest of it.

Do you think that EFA would have come along with his center left policies without the existence of Mintoff? EFA was able to shift the PN leftwards and appeal to the center left of the political spectrum because of Mintoff.

Prior to EFA, the PN’s social policy was ridiculous, in fact if my memory serves me right Mario Felice helped sink the PN’s re-election efforts in 1976 by saying that he would abolish income tax. Without income tax there would be no free education, health, social services etc.

Just as Mintoff helped the PN by allowing someone like EFA from the center left of the party to take over as leader, EFA in turn caused the MLP to shift away from the extreme left to the center. Without EFA there would have been no New Labour and Alfred Sant who cleaned up the party and made it electable again.

By the way, Daphne made a comment about the similarities between Mintoff and Eva Peron.

[Daphne – Oh, please. His motivation was no different to Eva Peron’s: hatred, envy and the desire for personal advancement, dressed up as the saintly wish to help the poor.

The only differences are that one was a woman who spent the money she used her power and position to acquire, and nobody is ever going to write a musical about Mintoff.]

For all her critics, Peron is still remembered with absolute awe in her native Argentina which rightly or wrongly I expect Mintoff to be remembered by history in a similar way.

There are also some, and I mean only some, similarities with Vietnam. The country suffered wars, including civil, for decades before Ho Chi Minh finally succeeded in laying the foundation for the Vietnam which exists today.

For all the divisiveness, hardship, perceived lack of speech and freedom etc. the time was right after the war in Malta for someone like Mintoff to come along and raise the bar in the struggle for more equality in the country.

And here’s some further reading:

http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2008/10/27/mintoff-the-electoral-facts-speak-for-themselves/

I’m sorry Frank, but I absolutely cannot accept your attempts at trying to place the PN and the MLP on the same footing when it comes to violence and human rights abuse. There just is no comparison. If it is a question of degree, then so is the quantity of sunlight visible during night and day. It is also highly offensive to all those beaten and tortured.

With respect to corruption, I don’t doubt that there will always be some corruption somewhere at some point, irrespective of the party in government, but it is the MLP who institutionalised the backhander as the necessary accessory to getting ANYTHING done when dealing with a government office, from getting a phone line to not having ‘problems’ with your parcel at the post office. The deprivation generated by the MLP’s economic mismanagement was a perfect incubator for this.

Finally, with respect to your comment abut whether or not we should have had independence, that’s a whole other discussion (although for Mintoff it was just a question of personal ego) but I’ll tell you this:

My father was very reluctant to vote yes in the independence referendum, not because he didn’t want it, but because he was afraid that Mintoff would try to set up a dictatorship. He eventually voted yes, his reasoning being that the British might give us independence anyway and better ask for it than make fools of ourselves and have it thrust upon us against our will.

But he was right about Mintoff.

Many thanks for your response Mike, I appreciate your efforts.

Let me assure you that I did not actually choose to ignore you earlier in this discussion. The truth is that many of the points you made were very similar in content to the ones put forward by Daphne and others.

Rather than repeat myself in putting forward alternative arguments individually, I felt it better to respond to you through the comments I made to Daphne.

You can rest assured Mike that my interest in Maltese politics have been peripheral to say the least even though I’m a keen student of Australian politics and have always held socialist leanings.

No Mike, even though I may sound like one, I am not a holocaust denier but do admit to believing that it has been exaggerated and highly politicized in order to win world sympathy for the Jewish state.

The only reason that I got involved in these discussions is because a relative who is out here on holidays introduced me to Daphne’s blog recently and was struck by the number of people from both sides of the political divide who’s minds are still shut tight to any faults in one party or give any credit for anything to their opponents.

Corruption is forever talked about forgetting the fact that it existed in Malta prior to Mintoff coming to power, during his years in government and ever since right up to this very day.
Governments of all shades, in every country including the worlds most powerful one are immersed in it.

Sadly, while I have always regarded Italy as long having had the most corrupt system of Government it appears that Malta could be even worse, possibly due to its size and the familiarity of most people to one another.

I well remember my fathers brother in law from Gozo who has now passed away and who happened to be a staunch “Nazzjonalist” freely admitting that he built up his wealth through Government corruption ever since the end of the war. There have obviously been Labour people who would have done the same over the years so please, let’s not be hypocrites and only remember corruption from only one side of the coin.

The same applies to violence. Nobody can deny that violence existed during the Labour years, only a close minded fool would but again, to overlook or deny the fact that violence, usually covert, was not committed by Nationalists who are invariably painted as innocent victims by their supporters, would be just as hypocritical.

To argue that one party was more corrupt or violent than the other is totally pointless because it is only a matter of degree and quite subjective. It all depends on which side of the fence you happen to be upon.

While venom and hatred is undoubtedly still carried by too many people from both sides I would like to think that rather than it being a trait of the Maltese character, it is more a lack of political maturity.

As expressed in an earlier opinion, I really do wonder if Malta was mature enough for political independence all those years ago!

When it comes to pensions – which was the point of your comment before I went off subject, the whole world is grappling with this complex issue.

I do not pretend to have an answer to it Mike, all I want to see is a fair and just method of looking after people who had gone through so much hardship in order to create the current prosperity, whether in Malta or anywhere else.

Once again many thanks for your detailed explanation of the current Maltese pension system even though it does not affect me in any way. Unfortunately, complex is not a good enough word to define it.

Yes – quite complicated – most of us will know how much we’ll be getting as a pension only when we apply for it. But that is Malta.

What surprises me is that there are a number of persons with a seemingly low IQ who really know all the subtle details of the social security regulations and take full advantage of these hidden and difficult-to-know regulations.